The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 5.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

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‘ [228] mingles with his gay melodies. His immediate horizon is bright with sunshine; but beyond is a land of darkness, the light whereof is darkness. It is walled about by the everlasting night. The skeleton sits at his table; a shadow of the inevitable terror rests upon all his pleasant pictures. He was without God in the world; he had no clear abiding hope of a life beyond that which was hastening to a close. Eat and drink, he tells us; enjoy present health and competence; alleviate present evils, or forget them, in social intercourse, in wine, music, and sensual indulgence; for tomorrow we must die. Death was in his view no mere change of condition and relation; it was the black end of all. It is evident that he placed no reliance on the mythology of his time, and that he regarded the fables of the Elysian Fields and their dim and wandering ghosts simply in the light of convenient poetic fictions for illustration and imagery. Nothing can, in my view, be sadder than his attempts at consolation for the loss of friends. Witness his Ode to Virgil on the death of Quintilius. He tells his illustrious friend simply that his calamity is without hope, irretrievable and eternal; that it is idle to implore the gods to restore the dead; and that, although his lyre may be more sweet than that of Orpheus, he cannot reanimate the shadow of his friend nor persuade “the ghost-compelling god” to unbar the gates of death. He urges patience as the sole resource. He alludes not unfrequently to his own death in the same despairing tone. In the Ode to Torquatus, —one of the most beautiful and touching of all ’